Six months ago, EVE Online developer CCP Games pulled out of the virtual reality market. The move came as a shock, given how well-suited and devoted CCP seemed to be to the tech, with international studios in the US and UK working on VR titles, and a tech-savvy EVE player base who were more likely to adopt VR early in its development cycle. As recently…

If you saw our heads-up about the HTC Vive Black Friday deal earlier this week (to recap, you get a Vive, Fallout 4 VR, Doom VFR and a free deluxe audio strap and more for £599 starting from tomorrow), then you'll be pleased to know that the Oculus Rift is also being discounted for Black Friday - starting TODAY, in fact. It's almost as if…

CCP, creators of one of our favourite VR games, EVE Valkyrie, are ceasing all VR development, according to a report on Icelandic business site mbl.is. The Reykjavík-based studio is best-known for its fantastically complex MMO EVE Online but has invested heavily in VR games. Sci-fi dogfighting sim Valkyrie is its flagship goggle-game, but one-on-one ball-lobbing sport Sparc (currently PSVR only) is a bit of a…

If you fancied hopping into the cockpit of a spacefighter and shooting spaceships while Starbucks off the telly bosses you around but you didn't own the cybergoggles necessary to play EVE: Valkyrie, good news: VR is now optional in the EVE Online spin-off. Developers CCP last night launched EVE: Valkyrie - Warzone [official site], a rebranding and update which gave the first-person dogfighter support for…

After almost a year strapped to the foreheads of cybergoggleers, EVE: Valkyrie [official site] is coming to regular screens too. The dogfighting spin-off from spacebastard MMO EVE Online will get new maps, ships, and modes with the launch of its free expansion 'Warzone' on September 26th, and more importantly will no longer require VR goggles. I've quite fancied a go at Valkyrie's first-person space-dogfighting but…

It wasn't hard to find the VR doubters at EVE Fanfest. One high profile EVE Online player told me he had no interest in CCP’s VR games but would “rather they have new teams working on VR than moving people from EVE to something like World of Darkness, which was left in the corner like a rotten apple.” Another said he was “glad that the…

Out at the EVE fanfest, where I'm out talking to the movers, shakers and griefers of EVE Online, CCP have just announced an update that takes the VR multiplayer dogfighting sim from the wide open spaces of...space...to ground-based scenarios. Going by the title Groundrush, it launches April 11th with one new map, Solitude, which I've spent some time with today. Solitude is set around a…

CCP make bloody good trailers, don't they? This one for EVE: Valkyrie [official site] and its Wormholes update a) reminded me that EVE: Valkyrie is the VR game I definitely enjoyed playing when it was in the preview stage and would like to play more of and b) just makes space look really cool with rainbow trails and explosions and dogfighting extravaganzas.

EVE: Valkyrie [official site], the cybergoggle spin-off from CCP's spaceship MMO, has warped into another pair of goggs. Having debuted on Oculus Rift back in March then hitting PlayStation V VR in September, it's now on HTC Vive headwear for your Starbuckin' satisfaction too. Valkyrie, I'll explain in case you missed all the boxfaces yelling, is a first-person spaceship dogfighting game. Along with singleplayer, it…

The first major free update for EVE: Valkyrie [official site] is now live, which means you can finally take the fight to an enemy team's carrier ship. Called Carrier Assault, this new mode taps into every Star Wars fan's obsession with flying down trenches, shouting "you're all clear kid," and then making really expensive military equipment blow up.

While most of us are still waiting for our Oculus Rifts to arrive, EVE: Valkyrie [official site] has been building a name for itself as one of the most beautiful and intense VR experiences. Free with every Rift preorder, Valkyrie released last month, will be arriving later this year on the Vive, and, best of all, will sport cross-platform multiplayer between the Rift, Vive, and…

EVE Valkyrie [official site], launch title for Oculus Rift, has launched, as you might expect given the Rift also launched yesterday. I've typed the word "launch" too much and now it doesn't make sense and I've started thinking about "lunch". Lunch was great. Bring back lunch. ANYWAY, to celebrate the launch of this launch game in which you launch spaceships down launch tubes and then…

Back in the day, I’d often get asked whether PlayStation or Xbox was best. Helpless efforts to argue "well, actually, PC is..." aside, I’d defuse their concerns about which had the superior graphics by naming which games you would or wouldn’t get on each. It’s not going to be any different for VR. But for now, when numbers are really all we have, I'm going…

And so the age of VR truly begins. It's been a long time coming, but 2016 is the year we finally find out if facebox gaming will sink or swim. I'm extremely excited personally, but still doubtful that it can reach far outside an adoring techno-niche: something far more elegant is needed for that, I feel. But that's for the future. Right now, today, the…

"Happy new year!" reads the email, as if this were good news. As if were a happy thing that, mere days after the traumatic horror-spend of Christmas, I need to find a few hundred quid from somewhere to buy an Oculus Rift headset, pre-orders for which open tomorrow.

I'm at a press preview event for EVE Valkyrie [official site]. It's CCP's multiplayer dogfighting VR game which they've just announced will come bundled with every Oculus Rift headset at launch. As lead game designer Andrew Willans explains the project: "The goal from day one was always to make you feel like a badass space pilot – Tom Cruise in Top Gun in space."

Pip played EVE Valkyrie [official site] earlier this week, getting to grips with the virtual reality space shooter in its near-to-final form. You can read what she thought right now. But alongside the impressions is news that a copy of Valkyrie is being included with every pre-order of the Oculus Rift.

Half the draw of Valkyrie [official site], EVE Online's VR dogfighting spin-off, is how zip-zap-straight-to-the-eyes it will look on your facebox of choice, so this here two minutes of space-shooting footage scarcely tells the whole story. It's closer than most such trailers to giving some sense of how the real deal with look and feel, though maybe I'm just saying that from my ivory tower…

EVE Valkyrie [official site] has a modest aspiration: to be the best competitive multiplayer game in virtual reality. It's a great statement in terms of grabbing headlines, but how are the development team at CCP's Newcastle studio translating that aspiration into a working reality? I asked that exact question of lead producer Owen O'Brien at the recent EVE FanFest event. His answer: "by talking to…

EVE: Valkyrie [official site] is so very, very pretty. The multiplayer dogfighting spin-off from CCP's intimidating MMO seems to capture what EVE battles sound like when someone tells you about them, not the confusing zoomed-out radar screen covered in blips that big fights actually look like. Being made exclusively for VR cybergoggles means the immersive view looks jolly good too. With their annual EVE Fanfest…